Climate, Race, and Imperial Authority:

The Symbolic Landscape of the

British Hill Station in India
Judith T. Kenny

Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

T
he hill station in modern India is fre- took precedence over the accessibility of gov-
quently viewed by the Western visitor as ernment to their minions conducted imperial
an island of Victorian values and symbols government from these remote locations.
without a clientele. When the architectural his- The superiority of the hill climate for Anglo-
torian Philip Davies visited the municipality of Indians (as British colonials called themselves3)
Ootacamund' in the Nilgiri mountains of south- was summarized by one colonial who wryly
ern India, he marveled at the landscape's observed that "like meat, we keep better here"
"curiously distorted vision of England, an (Eden 1983:129). And just as the climate was
anachronistic reflection in an Oriental mirror" the popular prescription for the physical health
(1985:128). British journalist Mollie Panter- of Anglo-Indians, the environment suited their
Downes had been similarly impressed with this mental health as well. Sparsely settled by Indi-
"comforting little piece of England" and "still ans, the hills were viewed as a blank slate on
flourishing reflection of British rule" (19673, which Anglo-Indians could create a familiar
105).
Perhaps it is not surprising that these English
visitors interpreted the landscape of Ootaca-
mund as a misplaced relic of India's colonial
past both in form and function. As a derivative
of a Western colonial experience, the hill sta-
tion's institutional complex and morphological
images included Christian churches, private
schools taught in the English language, the ad-
ministrative headquarters of district and state
government, and the kinds of recreational fa-
cilities usually associated with British country
life or an English spa.
Ootacamund, or Ooty as it was more affec-
tionately nicknamed, was one of approxi-
mately eighty settlements2 built by the British
to serve as mountain retreats from the "hot
season" of the Indian plains (Figure 1 ). Shortly
after the establishment of the first of the hill
stations in 1819, British colonials looked for-
ward to the annual summer migration up into
the hills away from the heat, the dust, and the
"natives." Beginning in the 1860s, select hill
stations also served as summer capitals of the
Figure 1 . British-built hill stations. Distribution of In-
"Raj"-a Sanskrit word for rule which became dian hill stations built in the nineteenth century.
synonymous with British crown rule. For six to Source: Mitchell 1972.
eight months each year, administrators who
believed that the comfort of the colonial rulers

Amah oithe Assooation oi Americnn Geographers, 8514). 1995, pp. 694-714

a1995 by Asvxiation of American Geographers
Published by Blackwell Publishers, 238 Main Street, Cambridge, M A 02142, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 lIF, UK
 The British Hill Station in India
landscape, a "comforting little piece of Eng-
land."
Colonial planning policies continue to
influence modern Indians through the persist-
ence of both the built structure of urban areas
and colonial models of landscape. The large
degree of continuity, however, has not pre-
cluded a reinterpretation of the hill station's
value and use. Certainly, the hill stations are not
museum pieces and the coexistence of the so-
cialist goals of an independent India with towns
historically associated with elitist, colonial Val-
ues create intriguing tensions and dilemmas for
planners. "Down Hill All the Way?," a recent
cover story of the national magazine India To-
day Uune 1989), focused attention on the fu-
ture of the hill ~tations.~In addition to question-
ing the continued attractiveness of the stations
as summer resorts given the impact of a grow-
ing number of visitors on the environmental
quality of the hill towns, the article touches on
the debate over the hill station's role as a "para-
sitic" or "generative" settlement form. In this
context, anticipating and planning for the fu-
ture of the hill stations cannot avoid an exami-
nation of the legacies of imperialists nor of the
social, political and aesthetic values that the
British inscribed on these resort settlements
and summer capitals of the "Raj."
The hill stations built some two hundred
years after the British arrived in India were not
simply a transplanted British landscape. They
were expressive rather of broader nineteenth-
century beliefs that set the colonial world apart
from Europe. The hill stations reflected and re-
inforced assumptions of social and racial differ-
ence, and in so doing naturalized the separa-
tion of rulers and ruled. This settlement form
and landscape model was embedded, of
course, in a larger system of colonial control
and a general discourse of imperialism? By im-
perialist discourse I mean the framework that
shaped the imperialists' interpretation and rep-
resentation of the non-western world via a sys-
tem of meaning and a process that sustained
relations of domination by representing them
as legitimate. Intertwined with imperialism is a
second discourse rooted in European classical
theories of climate and race which defined dif-
ference by the "temperate" and "torrid" zones.
Race, and its association with environment, be-
came key to the late nineteenth-century defini-
tion of differential power relations between the
imperial rulers and those they ruled. At the
695
same time, India served as a laboratory for en-
vironmental "knowledge" and for appropriate
"European" adaptations t o the tropics (Frenkel
and Western 1988; Aiken 1 994).6
What does the hill station suggest about the
differences between the British and the Indi-
ans? How was this landscape shaped to serve
as a place appropriate for the British rulers?
And what was the government's role in
affirming its sym bolic significance and material
effect? The imperial ideology of difference was
historically as well as geographically specific,
but owing to space limitations I cannot cover
the entire history of the hill station in British
India. I focus instead on the hill stations of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century
when, during the "hill craze" of the high impe-
rial age, their grandeur increased and the num-
ber of stations grew rapidly. As might be ex-
pected, the eighty Indian hill stations were not
all created equal. In addition to differences of
site and situation, hill stations varied in social
acceptability and function. Ootacamund-the
premier hill station of the Madras Presidency
and a summer capital of the British "Raj"-
serves as a particularly appropriate context for
examining the relations between government
practices and discourses of the Other in the
shaping of hill-station landscapes.
Discourses of the Other
To conceptualize discourse is to open an
avenue for the consideration of the relation
between language and ideology and between
linguistic and non-linguistic practice. Dis-
courses can be defined as social frameworks
that enable and limit ways of thinking and act-
ing.' These frameworks "embrace particular
cornbinations of narratives, concepts, ideolo-
gies and signifying practices" that correspond
to an area of social action (Barnes and Duncan
1992:s). Inherent in the concept are relations
between discourses, knowledge, representa-
tions, and power. Scholarly work in this post-
structural mode of analysis addresses dis-
courses of the Other (e.g., of race, gender or
any other conventional category of difference)
that imply power differentials. One of these,
colonial discourse theory,8 is specifically con-
cerned with "the construction of the colonial
subject in discourse, and the exercise of
colonial power through discourse" (Bhabha
696
I
1994:67). By definition, imperial discourse and
the discourse of climate might be subsumed in
this category. Maintaining their distinctiveness,
however, clarifies their historical role.
Examples abound in which cultural groups
have perceived other cultures not so much as
they are but in terms that benefit the perceiv-
ing group. The phrase imaginative geogra-
phies introduced by the literary theorist Ed-
ward Said (1979) describes these transforma-
tions of other cultures. These colonial geogra-
phies help the mind intensify its own sense of
itself by dramatizing the distance and differ-
ence between what is close and what is far
away (1979:55). Far from being innocent dis-
tortions of other cultures, those repre-
sentations imply power relations. Taxonomic
lores developed as part of these geographies
serve to separate races, regions, and nations
according to categories of difference. Although
Saids work on Orientalism is perhaps the best-
known analysis of imperial practices and dis-
courses of the Other-an analysis which shows
how European culture was able to manage-
and even produce-the Orient politically, so-
ciologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically
and imaginatively (1979:3)-others have ex-
tended his argument (e.g., lnden 1990).
Initially, critiques of Orientalist constructions
dealt primarily with a Western discourse
shaped by Western experts, government
agents, and authors in service of Western
power. The significance of such analyses rests
in part on the centrality of imperialism in the
cultural representations of Britain to the British
(Spivak 1985:2611. Subsequently, however,
postcolonial critiques broadened this perspec-
tive to accommodate the ambivalence of colo-
nial discourse in social relations between im-
perial and indigenous elites. Employing such
concepts as mimicry and cultural hybridity,
these later critics exposed the ironies of the
imperialists civilizing mission, a mission
which depicted indigenous people as: almost
.
the same, but not quite. . Almost the same
..
but not white . a mimic man . . . to be An-
glicized is empbaticaNy not to be English
(Bhabha 1994:86-87; emphases in the origi-
nal). In a related intellectual challenge, mem-
bers of the Subaltern Studies project rejected
the discourse of Indias elites as derivative and
chose instead to rewrite the history of colonial
India by giving a voice to the separate and
distinctive points of view of the masses (Guha
and Spivak 1988:vi).
Kenny
As important as these analyses are, much of
the postcolonial critique is peripheral to this
examination of the hill-station landscape which
focuses instead on the stories the British told
about tbemsel~es.~ In the summer capitals of
the Raj, the relative isolation of the hill station
afforded the British a stage with homelike
qualities on which to define their difference
and to confirm, in appropriately British terms,
their identity as rulers of India. Although the
Anglo-Indian sense of self was not divorced
from the Indian as colonial subject, the rulers
could overlook indigenous elites and subal-
terns while in the hills. The hill stations thus
served a particular role within the imaginative
geographies of imperial discourse, a role that
enabled the imperialist mind [to] intensify its
own sense of itself by dramatizing distance and
difference (Said 1979:55) from the centers of
Indian population in the plains.
One of the tropeslO which conveys this dis-
tance and its differential power relations is race.
Although the biological sciences have long dis-
missed race as a meaningful concept, it en-
dured in popular usage as a metaphor for the
ultimate, irreducible essence of difference. As
the literary theorist Abdul JanMohamed has ar-
gued, the perception of racial difference is, in
the first place, influenced by economic mo-
tives (1986:80). Borrowing a metaphor from
Frantz Fanon, he defines the conqueror/native
relationship as a Manichean struggle-a dual-
istic conflict between light and dark-in which
the colonialist discourse commodifies the na-
tive subject as a stereotyped object. This rep-
resentational economy, JanMohamed argues,
constitutes the central trope of colonialist dis-
course, one which ties changing political and
economic interests to the representation of
people and places during an age of race and
imperialism.
Among the shortcomings of colonial dis-
course theory, arguably the most prominent is
the characterization of imperialism as a ho-
mogenous ideology accompanied by a ho-
mogenization of racism. As Nicholas Thomas
(1994) observes, peoples have been distin-
guished by a variety of other criteria including
the lack of civility, industrial goods, and eco-
nomic deve1opment.l That said, race endures
as a key discursive device for defining differ-
ence in much of the nineteenth and twentieth
century. An historical analysis of British repre-
sentations of India suggests that these were
informed by other standards associated with a
 The British Hill Station in India
complex transformation of colonial society, and
most especially by discourses of imperialism
and climate/race.
The Transformation of Colonial
Society (1760s-1850s)
European contact with indigenous peoples
theoretically offered the options of responding
to the Other in terms of identity or difference.
Early in the colonial period, when trade with
India was primarily dependent on the good will
of Indians, the British tended to ignore sig-
nificant divergences in behavior or to explain
away those differences by reference to culture.
Recall that the merchants of the East India
Company were not a strong colonial force;
they were present only at the tolerance of local
landowners. Confined as they were to the four
coastal areas of Madras, Calcutta, Bombay, and
Surat from 1619 to the 1760s, the British knew
very little of India or Indian society. What has
been described as an easy symbiosis (Bayly
1988:69) was undermined in the later part of
the eighteenth century with the collapse of the
Mughal Empire and commercial conflict fueled
by wars between the British and French. The
increasing instability of the countryside and the
growing presence of the European military
helped to divert the British settlements from
commercial to imperialist channels (Spear
1963; Bayly 1988).
The transformation of colonial society was
also influenced by marked changes in English
society and culture between 1780 to 1850.
Utilitarian and Evangelical reformers called for
changes in Britain and in her colonies. They
criticized the style of conduct that had brought
wealth and power to the British in India by
calling it criminal behavior. The presence of the
British in India, however, was not disputed by
the reformers. Indeed, as duty replaced trade
as the expressed interest, the British felt a
greater sense of permanence in India. Reform
came in the Charter Act of 1813 which broke
the monopoly of the East India Company and
made Parliament the ultimate authority in India.
Such a move would have been unthinkable
only forty years earlier when in 1774 the gov-
ernor of Bengal, Warren Hastings, declared that
the dominion of all of India is what I never
wish to see (Watson 1981:I 29). But dominion
was precisely what the nineteenth-century
697
English evangelical reformer William Wilber-
force would promote. Let us endeavor to
strike our roots into their soil, he proclaimed,
by the gradual introduction and establishment
of our own principles and opinion; of our laws,
.
institutions and manners . . (Morris 1973:74).
This pronouncement of imperial interest
voiced the concerns of a nation challenged
by the needs of India.
Assuming control of a larger portion of India
resulted inevitably in a separation of the British
and their new Indian subjects. From the 1760s,
the East India Companys settlements in India
increasingly became models of British status.
Where once the social ideal was to live like a
Nawab (a Mughal title), new ideals of suburban
living and British architectural styles set the
standard for the colonial elite of Madras, Cal-
cutta, and Bombay. Similarly the troops that
had been concentrated in urban centers were
dispersed into cantonments that amounted to
petrified military camps (Davies 1985:77) on
the periphery. Adjacent to the military station,
the civil station was occupied by the members
of the colonial bureaucracy. While these new
settlements sheltered the colonials from some
of the inconveniences of life in India, they also
isolated them from Indian society.
Indian society was changing as well. Utilitar-
ian belief encouraged education of Indians so
that they might be raised to British standards
and values. Yet, as Bhabha describes, the edu-
cated Indian subject became the ultimate figure
of mockery. The mimic colonial subject sug-
gested that to be Anglicized was emphatically
not to be English. By 1850, the emergence of
a Westernized Indian elite in the port cities
challenged British views of the transformation
of Indian society. Indian society in general en-
tered a period of stress. British policy created
social disturbances through the great land set-
tlements of northern India and the displace-
ment of many landholders, and the imposition
of British customs and laws endangered Indian
religions. Moreover, aggressive policies of an-
nexation carried out by the East India Com-
panys Governor-General, the Marquess of
Dalhousie, resulted in British control of three-
fifths of India by 1856. The improvement of
India appeared to be a plot against the old
cultures of India. British military authorities and
high-caste members of the East India Com-
panys Bengal Army provided the flashpoint to
the incendiary situation. Policies disliked on re-
ligious grounds, including the movement of
698
troops overseas and the use of greased car-
tridges-both in violation of caste restrictions-
were the rallying points for the Indian Mu-
tiny, also known as the Sepoy Rebellion or
Uprising of 1857. For fourteen months, the
world of British authority dissolved on the
northern plains of India.
Although the spirit of reform had been in-
creasingly tinged with expressions of racial su-
periority, the hostilities associated with the up-
rising underlined the impression of irreconcil-
able difference. The year of the mutiny marked
significant shifts in the British representations
of India as expressed in their theories of impe-
rial authority and discourses of difference.
Blaming the mutiny on the East India Company,
the Parliament in London abolished the Com-
pany and named Victoria sovereign of British
India in 1858. India became an imperial pos-
session and the Crowns representatives there
(military and civilian officials) acquired new
status and responsibility. Rather than promote
change, the new government was to protect
and preserve Indians religious traditions and
cultural differences.
Concurrently, the prevalence of new scien-
tific theories of racial superiority during the
1850s supported a growing British preoccu-
pation with the grandeur of our race (Sir
Charles Dilke cited in Elridge 1973:49)-or, less
kindly, with the mutiny mentality. The irony
of this fixation on racial difference was the psy-
chic and social distortion it entailed for the
British in India.
While profiting from the fear on which the Raj
rests, the Anglo-Indians are victims of a fear which
India arouses in them. They live amidst scenery
they d o not understand, sense that Indians hate
them and feel India to be a poisonous country
intending evil against them. (Parry 1972:279-280)
If their imaginative geography reinforced the
Anglo-Indian sense of superiority, it likewise
fed their fears of a scenery they do not un-
derstand.
The transformation of Victorian British values
and beliefs necessarily spilled over onto the
landscapes of the colonial world (King 1976;
Oldenburg 1984; Frenkel and Western 1988;
Metcalf 1989; Kanwar 1990). Scholars who
have analyzed the social and political under-
pinnings of colonial architecture and urban de-
velopment have emphasized that the imposing
buildings built by the British served as social
controls over the indigenous populations
and/or as health sanctuaries for Anglo-Indians.
Kenny
Thomas Metcalf (1989:7) makes this point ex-
plicitly; imperial architectural styles were, in his
view, manifestations of an interconnected
structure of power and knowledge that in-
formed colonialism everywhere. Although
overgeneralized, Metcalfs thesis sometimes il-
luminates as when he notes that: In the public
buildings put up by the Raj it was essential
always to make visible Britains imperial posi-
tion as ruler, for these structures were charged
with the explicit propose of representing em-
pire itself (1989:2). But there are many ways
of building a building or landscape, and the
self-consciousness of British debates over ar-
chitectural styles nicely record their changing
visions of themselves as rulers of India.
The expression of these concerns was rarely
straightforward, however, in British settlement
planning. Frequently, public safety served as a
metaphor for control (Oldenburg 1984), and
decisions putatively based on health concerns
masked desires for comfort and a prestigious
environment for the colonial populations
(Frenkel and Western 1988). Veena Olden-
burgs account of the rebuilding of Lucknow
after its destruction in the rebellion of 1857, for
instance, emphasizes the British concern for
security from internal conspiracy. By demolish-
ing the labyrinth of the traditional city, British
planners created space for a broad street net-
work that facilitated surveillance and police de-
ployment. Similarly, in the hills, the British sus-
tained the illusion of an English town (Kanwar
1990) by housing the Indian service population
in segregated areas.
Climate, Race and Imperial
Authority
Climate and Health
The modest scholarly attention devoted to
the British hill station in India reflects perhaps
its seemingly natural existence in a cultural
ecology of colonial life. Initially, the hill station
was the upland counterpart to the lowland
military station, save for its distancing of Anglo-
Indians from the perceived unpleasantries of
life in India. Hill stations were a relatively new
colonial settlement form when, in 1838, Emily
Eden wrote from the Himalayan hill station of
Simla to a family member in England
(1983:129):
 The British Hill Station in India
It certainly is very pleasant to be in a pretty place,
with a nice climate. Not that I would not start off
this instant, and go dak [transport by relay1 all over
the hot plains, and through the hot wind, if I were
told that I might sail home the instant I arrived at
Calcutta, but as nobody makes me that offer, I can
wait here better than anywhere else. . . .
Miss Edens sentiments regarding hill-station
life would be shared by several generations of
Anglo-Indians. Patrons of the colonial hill sta-
tions liberally praised natural environments that
were relatively cool, green, and unpopulated.
The contrast with the lowlands seemed to pro-
voke the question could this be India? (Pan-
ter-Downes 1967). In the case of Ootacamund,
assessments ranging from Tennysons descrip-
tion of the sweet half-English air of Ootaca-
mund (Baker 1967:217) to a later paean to its
value as an island of British atmosphere hung
above the Indian plains (Pentland 1928) com-
municated the sites superiority and the escape.
Geographic research on the hill station em-
phasizes its role in the physical and mental
health of the colonials (Mitchell 1972; Spencer
and Thomas 1948). As Nora Mitchell notes in
her discussion of the hill station, the Anglo-ln-
dians perception of healthful environments
were shaped by a combination of classical
theories and the medieval belief in miasmic airs
(poisoned by noxious, decaying organic mat-
ter). Although in hindsight these ideas guided
the development of the hill stations and the
perception of them as healthy environments,
the early record of British encounter suggests
a more cautious, if not mixed, reaction to the
discovery of the hills. As Sir Richard Burton
explained in talking about the hill station of
Ootacamund, we demi-Orientals, who know
by experience the dangers of mountain air in
India, only wonder at the man who first
planted a roof-tree upon the Neilgherries
(1851 :270). Without an understanding of ma-
larias cause, the disease was ascribed to the
dangers of mountain air in India. Only after
exploration of the interior refined the colonials
definition of fever zones did the cooler cli-
mate and the assumed absence of disease
serve as a rationale for their hill stations. Pro-
motion of this new resource was required, as
was an interpretation of its benefits (Kenny
1991). Not all were suited to the hills according
to Dr. Baikie (1834; 1857), the resident medical
expert of Ootacamund. He warned that two
European groups might find the hill climate un-
satisfactory: 1) pensioners owing to their accli-
699
mation to the climate of the plains; and 2)
women owing to their highly mobile tem-
peraments (presumably temperamental)
and/or preference for the social life of the low
country. Ironically, by the late nineteenth cen-
tury many would describe the hill stations as
places for women while the men of action
popularized in heroic tales preferred the plains.
Despite the perceived health benefits, the
hill stations separation from the low country
caused concern when British officials first mi-
grated to these sanitaria. Before the abolition of
the East India Company, the Company com-
plained of the expense incurred by these an-
nual, unofficial retreats (Kenny 1991). But by
the 1850s, persistence overcame official objec-
tions as district, provincial, and imperial ad-
ministrations moved their summer headquar-
ters to the hill stations. Imperial government
moved 1,200 miles from Calcutta to Simla; the
Madras Government spent six months at 00-
tacamund; the Bombay Government occupied
Mahableshwar and Poona for four months
each; the Bengal Government went to Darjee-
ling for three months; and the Government of
the North-Western Provinces and Oudh spent
five months in Nani Tal (Figure 2).12These hab-
its became official only after Simla was desig-
nated as the Viceroy of Indias summer capital
in 1864. In 1870, Ootacamund, next in rank,
officially became the seat of summer govern-
ment for the governor of the Madras Presi-
dency. Other summer capitals soon were ac-
corded official status.
The definition of who would benefit from
the hill station, and for what reasons, was a key
aspect in an evolving nineteenth-century dis-
course. The discourse also justified govern-
ment practices which further sanctioned racial
and spatial categories. Imperial practices sup-
ported the distinction of this British enclave not
only as an appropriate place for colonial ad-
ministrators, but also as a racial and spatial cate-
gory that symbolized British superiority and
difference. Features which seemed to set apart
Europeans (used as a nineteenth-century ra-
cial category) were ascribed to the hill station
and inscribed in its landscape.
Race and Imperial Authority
The Victorian revival of theories relating race
and climate coincided with the waning of re-
form enthusiasm in post-Mutiny India. These
700 Kenny
Figure 2. The imperial and provincial seats of gov-
ernment for British India, 1857-1910. The informal
practice of conducting business in the hill stations
during summer months was formalized after 1864.
Imperial Government then moved their official head-
quarters to Simla during the hot season, while the
Madras Presidency spent the season at Ootacamund,
the Bombay Presidency visited Poona and Ma-
hableshwar four months each, the Bengal Govern-
ment left Calcutta for Darjeeling, and the Govern-
ment of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh
moved its seat of administration from Agra (later
Lucknow) to the hill station of Naini Tal. Sources:
Gopal 1965; Mitchell 1972.
theories rationalized the irreconcilable differ-
ences between Europeans and Indians as a
form of environmental determinism. The links
between environment and racial charac-
teristics were not new to the nineteenth cen-
tury, but the discourse of climate was dressed
in new scientific terms. By the early 185Os,
theories of racial difference assumed that racial
types were fixed and the products of multiple
creations. The theory of evolution, while over-
turning these beliefs, did not loose the hold of
pseudo-scientific racism. Indeed, evolutionary
theorys struggle for survival provided a
mechanism for racial differentiation and con-
flict. In that struggle, the White race prevailed
because it was more advanced and adaptable
having evolved in a physical environment (Brit-
ain) that bred a superior people capable of
administering others (Hutchins 1967; Metcalfe
1964).
Races of the world were differentiated by
anatomy and intellect and kept apart by cli-
mate, with each sharing its prescribed salubri-
ous limits (Hutchins 1967:161). The theory
further implied that an Englishman placed in
Bengal would live with a tolerable degree of
health but he would soon cease to be the
same individual and his descendants would
degenerate. The European constitution could
not survive the third generation in the climate
of India proclaimed the Parliaments Select
Committee on Colonization and Settlement (of
India) of 1857 (Hutchins 1967:61).
The theoretical relationship between cli-
mate, race, and health was refined throughout
the latter part of the nineteenth century. In
Health Resorts for Tropical Invalids, the Sur-
geon General of the Bombay Presidency
launched a protest against those who have
portrayed the climate of India as not inimical to
Europeans (Moore 1881:3-4). Perhaps it is the
need for such a protest in 1881 that is most
notable. He argued that the climate and the
exposure to disease in the plains threatened
the health of Anglo-Indians. It is only by peri-
odical escape from the influence of the plains,
he advised, that the majority of Europeans can
retain both mental and physical health and vig-
our. The need to escape the heat meant of
course a simultaneous escape from the na-
tive.
Although the new government of India
gradually accepted these hill migrations,
complaints from the governed mounted with
the time spent in the hills and the expense
associated with maintaining second, summer
seats of government. Indian protest reached its
peak in 1884 when thirty thousand petitioners
from the Madras presidency alone asked Par-
liament to halt the annual exodus to the hills
and the hill craze. For many Indians and cer-
tain members of the non-official British com-
munity it appeared that the government was
planning a permanent move to Ootacamund
and that every district collector was building a
summer office on higher ground. Protests were
heard from other cities in British India where
Indian subjects questioned the moves of impe-
rial, provincial, and district offices into the hills
often for more than half the year (Kenny 1990).
 The British Hill Station in India 701

In defense of this practice, the liberal gover-
nor of the Madras Presidency cited the greater
efficiency of administrators in the hills. Refer-
ring to gentlemen from "the rainy isles" at work
in the hill station, h e pictured "one of the most
hard working men in the Presidency, rubbing
his hands in a driving Scotch mist, as happy as
a Newfoundland dog on a frosty day in Eng-
land" (Madras Maik July 1, 1884). Representing
the contrary views of the petitioners, an edito-
rial in the Madras Mail (April 1, 1884) argued
that:
Ootacamund is a very good kind of place for men
on leave, for dames, damsels, small boys and po-
nies; but it is not a good place for the development
of a high sense of duty, or the attainment of that
active sympathy of the people of India which is as
oil to the bearing of state.
This representation was a popular one among
those who pictured not increased efficiency
but men on holiday pursuing leisure activities
in the hills (Figure 3 ) . As the stay of the upper
echelons of government in the hill station capi-
tals increased to eight months out of twelve, it
was only natural that the struggle for the domi-
nant representation of hill-station activity
would become critical.
Ultimately, the government's thesis of in-
creased efficiency in a climate suited to natives
of Britain outweighed the petitioners' demands
for accessibility to decisionmakers. The peti-
tioners were effective, however, in reducing
the amount of time spent in the hills. O n the
recommendation of Parliament, the governors
and their secretariats were limited to six to
seven months a year in the summer capitals.
Despite growing nationalist protests, the bu-
reaucratic machine of imperial government

Figure 3. The MacNab family in front of their hill station bungalow, circa 1YOI, replete with horses, dog, parasol,
and solar topee. Source: India Office Library and Records Office, London. MacNab Collection #752/4 No. 58.
Reprinted by permission of The British Library.
702
had momentum on its side. With the approval
of Parliament, the practice of British authority
and the hill station were inextricably linked.
The summer seat of government had in effect
become a symbol of the Raj. Successive ad-
ministrators, from governors to municipal
councilmen, believed it was their duty to en-
hance the beauty of the new capitals and to
increase their attractions. As one retiring gov-
ernor of the Madras Presidency reminded his
constituents, be sure to make Ootacamund
beautiful, make it convenient but above all
keep it healthy (Ootacamund Municipal
Council October 20, 1900).
The English Landscape of the
Hill Station
For many outside the hill stations social
world, Ootacamund served as a symbol of the
colonial administrations disregard for the peo-
ple of India. To the colonial officials, however,
the landscape of Ootacamund symbolized a
view of social order, the natural environment
for the British representatives of imperial gov-
ernment. The viceroy Lord Lytton captured this
view during his visit to Ootacamund in 1877:
I affirm it to be a paradise. . . . The afternoon
was rainy and the road muddy, but such Eng-
Iish rain such delicious English mud (quoted
in Price 1909:63). Lytton further described a
landscape composed of familiar British fea-
tures: Imagine Herefordshire lanes, Devon-
shire downs, Westmoreland lakes, Scotch
trout streams. Early visitors also projected im-
ages of England onto the natural environment
of Ootacamund and thereby influenced the
development of the landscape (see Kenny
1990). The founder of Ootacamund, John
Sullivan, set out to make the hill station an
Indian Utopia with an English landscape by in-
troducing not only European trees, flowers,
fruit and vegetables, but also the serpentine
lake of a country estate (Figure 4).13Later visi-
tors to the hill station commented on the re-
markable similarities between this landscape
and home. The British statesman and utilitarian
Thomas Babington Macauley, arriving in Oota-
camund in 1834, saw:
a pleasant surprise of an ampitheatre of green hills
encircling a small lake, whose banks were dotted
with red-tiled cottages surrounding a pretty Gothic
Church. The whole station presented very much
Kenny
the look of a rising English watering place. (Treve-
lyan cited in Price 1909:64)
The English watering place awaited its trans-
formation from sanitarium to summer capital
after 1870.
Following Ootacamunds designation as the
seat of summer government, the hill station
underwent significant change. Between 1871
and 1901, population grew rapidly from 9,932
to 18,596 permanent residents and a seasonal
population of more than twice that. The in-
crease in officials and staff was accompanied
by rising numbers of Indians and Anglo-Indians
seeking commercial opportunities. The 1884
establishment of permanent military headquar-
ters of the Madras Army on the hills extended
the official presence. Ooty was perceived by
the Anglo-Indian community as a British settle-
ment despite the fact that the Indian population
outnumbered the European by a ratio of more
than ten to one and that the site included a
small but significant Indian commercial class.
Although Indian residents of Ootacamund held
the majority of the stations real estate during
this period, they were absent for the most
part from the settlements social and political
circles.
The landscape model chosen for the sum-
mer capital, therefore, need not incorporate
the monumental displays of colonial authority
in the Indian Feudal or Indo-Sarcenic styles
typical of public buildings in the plain^.'^ Sym-
bolizing the genteel, refined, and aristocratic
images of English upper-class living-or, as the
British newspaper The Statesman might have
put it, the aristocratic race (cited in South of
india Observer (SIO): September 12, 1877)-
the hills were well-suited for this elegant pas-
toral model and the ruling class life associated
with it. In the case of Ootacamund, contem-
porary literature depicted it as a site of unpre-
tentious dignity, beautiful (English) surround-
ings, and a legitimacy based in its history
(Eagan 1912:31).
In structure and architectural design, the public
buildings are, naturally, neither elaborate nor pre-
tentious. Yet, the prominence usually afforded
them by their position on hill crests, coupled with
their beautiful surroundings, lends them a certain
dignity, while much of historic interest attaches to
them.
These qualities imply, moreover, the virtues as-
sociated with the late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century model of an essentially rural
 The British Hill Station in India 703

Figure 4. Ootacamund Site Map of the Hill Station, 1913. Location of "European" and Indian settlements within
the hill station. Relative elevation indicates the separation of uses by topography as well as by distance. Source:
Adapted from 1834, 1858, and 1895-96 plan maps.

and an essentially unchanging England. The ru-
ral mode implied greatness centered not on
the commercial class and the industrial towns
but on the traditional aristocracy and land own-
ership (Weiner 1981; Williams 1973). In tracing
these attitudes toward the city and the country,
Raymond Williams observed that the cultural
importance of rural ideals grew despite the de-
clining importance of the working rural econ-
omy. Rural ideals of how to live well, "from the
style of the country-house to the simplicity of
the cottage" (Williams 1973:248), afforded an
image of Home for the colonial society: "its
rural peace contrasted with the tropical or arid
places of actual work; its sense of belonging,
of community, idealised by contrast with the
tensions of colonial rule and the isolated alien
settlement" (1973:281).
Historic attachments to place and a sense of
belonging were incorporated in the official
landscape of Ooty. In 1870, Stone House-the
oldest building in the hill station and one asso-
ciated with the "discoverer" of Ootacamund,
John Sullivan-was chosen to house the Secre-
tariat's offices. This singular example of English-
style stone structure became the center of
official business. The first effort to improve the
official landscape involved the beautification of
the grounds on Stonehouse Hill followed by
improvements to the Secretariat building. If
earlier observations of Ootacamund's natural
environment had inspired comparisons to the
704
landscape of a gentlemans park, these later
investments groomed the image (Price
1909:20-21).
While Stonehouse Hill was the center of
official business, Government House would
soon become the center of Ootacamunds so-
cial life (Figure 5). Prior to its construction in
1877, governors vied with other visitors to rent
one of the more substantial houses during the
season, but these rents and other expenditures
on personal accommodations were the per-
sonal responsibility of the governors and their
staffs. But in 1876, inspired perhaps by the
proclamation naming Queen Victoria queen
empress, the presiding governor of the Madras
Presidency, the Duke of Buckingharn, estab-
lished a hill residence. The governor acquired
a house on the slopes of the highest hill in
Figure 5. Government House, Ootacamund, circa 1905. This photograph was taken from the lawn at the back
of the Governors mansion where the classical portico of the Palladian-style country house was viewed to best
advantage. Source: Price 1909.
Kenny
Ooty for that purpose. Shortly after, construc-
tion began on a new mansion designed along
the lines of the Dukes own country house,
Stowe House, Buckinghamshire. Buckinghams
choice of a Palladian-style country house rep-
resented, presumably, the Dukes ideas on the
appropriate design of a country house as well
as his interest in replicating home. Although
the classical columns of the Palladian facade
went out of fashion during the late eighteenth
century with the influence of romanticism, the
style saw a revival in the early nineteenth cen-
tury just as Stowe House was in the planning
stages. Perhaps, as Mark Girouard suggests,
the classical portico of a Palladian house sym-
bolized more than education and culture.
Certainly the architect Gilbert Scott, w h o was
brought up in the 1820s under the shadow of
 The British Hill Station in India 705

Stowe and the dukes of Buckingham, saw authori-
tarianism in great classical houses. Their cold and
proud palladianism . . . seems to forbid approach-
the only rural thoughts they suggest are of game
keepers and park rangers. (Cirouard 1978242)
While romantic styles would dominate the hill
stations residential, commercial, and govern-
mental office buildings, the Governors Palla-
dian mansion was an exception.
This mansion was not without controversy.
The Imperial Fund was tapped over a number
of years in an effort to complete Government
House and to furnish it. Monitoring these ex-
penses, the Madras Mail newspaper voiced
loud criticism of the governors hill station con-
struction program. After completion of the fa-
cilities, however, Government House and the
Secretariat Offices came to be seen as natural
parts of the landscape and of governance.
Literally and figuratively, Government com-
manded the high ground of the hill station, as
did the .English town center. Figure 6, entitled
A General View of Ootacamund, captures
Telegraph Hill-Ootys British center-as it ap-
peared during the 1880s. Concentrated within
this area, and located above the Indian bazaar,
were the official church (St. Stephens), district
and municipal government offices, and, in in-
creasing numbers, British-managed businesses.
St. Stephens, built in 1826 with East India Com-
pany funds and with timbers from the de-
stroyed palace of an Indian ruler (shown in the
foreground of Figure 6), served as the geo-
graphic center of the hill station, the historic
center from which the station had grown, and
the geometric center from which all mileage
within the district was figured.
Although English land uses clustered on

Figure 6 . A General View of Ootacamund, circa 1894. This view of the English town center on Telegraph Hill
shows the roof of St. Stephens Church in the foreground and the concentration of public offices and English
facilities in the background. Source: Cambridge University Centre for South Asian Studies. M i s s Pilkington
Collection, Unpublished travel journal (April 1894).
706
this hilltop from the stations early years, the
development of an English town became a
conscious effort after 1870. Colloquially, Tele-
graph Hill became Cutcherry, or public office,
Hill.
Efforts have been made during the past few years
for the convenience of the public, to concentrate
around the Collectors Offices and Courts, the Post
& Telegraph Offices and Courts, the Post & Tele-
graph Offices, the Tahsildar Submagistrates Court,
the Registration Office, and in a few days the Bank
will be in our midst. In short what is known as the
Cutcherry Hill [is] the very heart of Ootacarnund.
. . . (90: March 22, 1884)
In 1884, the Madras Army located its head-
quarters on an eastern spur of Telegraph Hill.
Ten years later, municipal business was accom-
modated in the last administrative building to
be constructed on the hill. Located on the
lower side of the hill above the bazaar, the
Municipal Building was the only public office
on Telegraph Hill with a view of the Indian
areas of town. The English town center of Ooty
was thus separate from and superior to
downslope landscapes. The British vantage
point opened vistas to the surrounding hills
and the lake below while closing off for the
most part the view of the natives. Even within
the hill station, height distanced the rulers from
the ruled.
In Ooty, social rank was closely matched
with elevation. This match reflected the pictur-
esque quality of the setting as well as a favor-
able interpretation of the sites healthfulness.
From the arrival of the first British in Ootaca-
mund, they had compared the topography of
the station to an amphitheater of hills surround-
ing the lake. Accordingly, the British built su-
perior class residences on the crests of the
hills that made up this amphitheater. To be
sure, some worried initially over exposure to
certain winds, or to possible associations be-
tween crest sites and illness, or even to dis-
tances between bungalows that were time-
consuming and perhaps dangerous (DeWend
1829). But these were momentary concerns.
After hill stations were firmly established, their
morphologies were seen as natural and pic-
turesque rather than precarious and their alti-
tudinal positions as indicators of the salubrity
of residential sites safely distanced from un-
healthy Indian settlements.
Kenny
The Unhealthy Indian
Settlements
The British faced a dilemma in the hill station.
Ootacamund as a British settlement depended
on a large Indian population to support the
privileged lifestyle of Anglo-Indians. But this in-
dispensable Indian labor pool was also viewed
as a source of disease that could threaten the
hill stations role as sanitarium. The extent of
the governors entourage suggests the labor
required for managing hill-station life:
Several special trains conveyed his [the gover-
nors] patriarchal following of staff, band, clerks,
servants of all kinds with their families, between
five and six hundred souls, besides nearly a hun-
dred horses from the stables. . . . (Pentland
1928:l 37)15
In Simla, the Viceroys hunting expeditions
alone required 2,000 bearers (Kanwar
1990:135). The luxurious lifestyle did not guar-
antee immunity from the disease that spread
through the low country, and the Indian settle-
ments within the station served as a reminder
of that fact (see Figure 4). A cholera epidemic
in 1877 raised serious questions among the
British residents of Ootacamund. How was
Ootacamunds reputation as a beautiful and sa-
lubrious spa to be insured? Furthermore, who
was to benefit from the sanitation measures?
Seven months before Lord Lyttons 1877
declaration that Ootacamund was paradise, the
local newspaper delivered a rather different as-
sessment. Reporting on another case of im-
ported cholera, the Anglo-Indian newspaper
South of India Observer expressed concern
about the (British) communitys ability to avoid
a severe epidemic with the growing migration
of Indians up from the lowlands. Disease im-
ported with migrant Indians represented an
external threat to the health and welfare of
Ootacamund. Assessments of Ootacamunds
health problems and the methods used in
combating them reflected not only the con-
temporary understanding of medical prob-
lems, but also a primary concern for the health
of the European population. Controlling built
space as a means of maintaining social hy-
giene had been part and parcel of European
advancements in medical knowledge since
the eighteenth century (Foucault 1980; Burke
1985).6 Fearing that the coalescence of the
 T h e British Hill Station in India 707

Figure 7. The Lower Bazaar, circa 1875, showing the Willow Bund crossing the lake. In 1895, the portions of
the lake to the right of the earthen bridge would be filled in to improve sanitary conditions and to add to British
park land. Source: India Office Library and Records Office, London. Collection No. 394/87. Reprinted by per-
mission of The British Library.

Indian and European sections o f Ootys popu-
lation threatened the health of the town (30:
M a y 30, 18771, Ootys planners made Indian
areas the prime targets for improvement.
Ironically, the cholera epidemic in the hill
station resulted in improvements in the British
landscape. A February 1877 report on Ootaca-
munds sanitary conditions noted that the larg-
est number of cholera victims resided near the
bazaar area and the contaminated water of the
lake (Figure 7). Dense living conditions, sanita-
tion problems, and disease defined the envi-
ronment o f the bazaar and, according to one
travel guide book, climate and race explained
it:
where you have Indians congregating together in
congeries of dwellings called parcherries, agra-
harams or anything else you like, you must have
insanitary conditions, and the danger is immeasur-
ably more in a cold hill station where the tempta-
tion to huddle more closely together for warmth
in unclean surroundings is proportionately greater.
There has been more than one plague spot of this
kind in Ootacamund for many generations now.
(Higgenbotham 1912:74)
In cold hill stations, the Indians need to hud-
dle more closely together merely exaggerated
natural tendencies. Comments of this sort
were commonplace from the earliest years of
hill-station living. British explanations invariably
focused on Indians reactions to the British-
style climate of the hill stations and to the basic
insuitability of the climate t o the race, and just
as invariably omitted the social constraints of
limited space for Indian settlements and the
708 Kenny
I
expense of hill-station real estate. Moreover,
the British usually glossed over the caste dis-
tinctions associated with parcherries and agra-
harams-the difference between the living ar-
eas of brahamins and untouchables, respec-
tively-thus implying that Indian dwelling areas
were indistinguishable in terms of environ-
mental quality.
The crowded, unsanitary conditions in the
bazaar were lamented but not remedied.
Budgetary attention focused instead on the
municipal market located in the bazaar where
conditions were described as unhealthy and
inconvenient. Municipal council records ex-
tolled the benefits of improving the drainage
within the market area which would enable
"Europeans to do their own marketing" and to
improve food quality for hill-station residents
(Ootacamund Municipal Council April 14,
1877). The newly constructed market, with its
cleanliness and "picturesque" color, soon be-
came a favorite excursion for European visitors
t o Ootacamund.
Ootacamund Lake was targeted for improve-
ment as well. From the construction of the
popular serpentine lake in the 1820s it had
served as a source of drinking water for the
bazaar until 1877 when the sanitary commis-
sioner warned Indian residents to avoid drink-
ing from the lake. Previously, the municipality
had reclaimed some of the swampy area at the
eastern end of the lake; this reduced the area
of "unhealthy" ground as it created a new pub-
lic recreation area. In 1875, the reclaimed land
was enclosed, planted as a park, and named
after a previous governor, Lord Hobart. The
culmination of the lake draining scheme took
another twenty years, in part due to the on-
going protest against "robbing Ooty of one of
its most beautiful features" (90:January 12,
1884). The drained area, which extended from
the bazaar to the lake's eastern edges, was
ultimately added to Hobart Park and prepared
for "public" use. In 1895, what had been a
sanitary problem was turned into a social asset
for the upper-echelons of hill-station society.
The purpose of health was served, according
to Victorian standards, by providing an exten-
sive field for exercise as well as a necessary
sanitary improvement for the bazaar residents.
Apparently the British never considered using
the reclaimed land as an area for resettling the
crowded area of the bazaar.
Ootacamund's medical officer urged more
extreme measures to preserve the station's
health (S10:June 6, 1903) following the plague
of 1903. The local Anglo-Indian newspaper
commented on the incidental benefits of these
public health measures:
If the scourge of plague had not visited Ootaca-
mund last year, we should have probably gone for
years with those unsightly and insanitary native
houses close to the main road. Now nearly all have
been swept away and the road broadened. The
gradients from the lower to the upper path in this
neighbourhood have been much improved, and
the whole locality altered. ( S O :March 12, 1904)
The new carriage road in the area of the lake
suggested other possibilities. Portions of the
bazaar characterized as "centres of disease"
were destroyed, but the problem of over-
crowding was merely exacerbated as displaced
residents sought housing in the bazaar's re-
maining structures. The 1907 Hill Sanitaria Mu-
nicipal Act reinforced these measures by
authorizing hill municipalities to raise taxes and
control land uses in order to maintain the
healthful status of these stations. Anglo-Indians
justified these extreme measures as a means of
preserving the convenience, beauty, and salu-
brity of hill stations in environments suited to
the British in India.
Visitors to the Summer Capital
British Guests
Appropriate to the status of local society and
the significance of the landscape, hill stations
drew many visitors during the official "season."
No longer simply a refuge for the Anglo-Indian,
travel guides "packaged" Ootacamund as a
summer capital of the Empire which combined
the romantic "call of the East" with the ameni-
ties of an English town. As increasing numbers
of British travelers added the empire to their
list of required destinations, travel guides as-
sumed that the Nilgiris hill country would be
included on their itineraries:
"half-English" is wonderfully descriptive of the
general characteristics of the Nilgiris. . . . English
fruits, vegetables, and flowers we have in abun-
dance; but also the fruits and produce of the trop-
ics to identify the East; . . . in style and interior our
houses are very like English country places; but
the large compounds surrounding them, with their
godowns and out houses are characteristically In-
 The British Hill Station in India
dian.. . . in many essential respects we here enjoy
the advantages of the West, coupled with many
other Eastern advantages which the West is de-
nied. (Niligiri Information Bureau [NIB] 1911:l)
These guides for the hill station spoke favorably
of the country atmosphere:
Broad, well-laid roads sweep and undulate over a
country of beautiful gardens and extensive
stretches of turf studded with ornamental trees
which gives to the whole the appearance of one
vast park. . . . All around, forming as it were an
exquisite natural background to mans handiwork,
rise the hills, serene and grand, conveying a sense
of peace and joy of life. (NIB 1911:7)
The juxtaposition of the romantic, uncultivated
qualities of the surrounding Nilgiris countryside
with the picturesque British qualities of the
station itself was appealing indeed to the British
eye.
The attractiveness of a place of solitude in a
natural state (i.e., India with only a few Indians)
drew tourists just as it had interested explorers.
Inspired partly by romanticism and partly by
amateur anthropology, one popular tourist ex-
cursion visited a Toda mund (village) to see a
local aboriginal group. The same enthusiasm
did not extend to visiting agriculturist tribal
groups in the hills.17 Because the Todas were
one of the important sights of the hills, one
governor hosting the viceroy, Lord Curzon, ar-
ranged for ten specimen male and ten fe-
males to greet him (Ampthill July 20, 1902).
Whatever their effect, Lord Curzon sang the
praises of Ootacamunds charm. According to
the viceroy, he came, saw, and was conquered
(Ampthill August 20, 1902), presumably by
Ootacamunds romantic setting and a sense of
comfort and control conveyed by the British
landscape.
Visiting hill-tribe settlements was an enter-
tainment common to several hill stations.
These visits shaped British representations of
the indigenous inhabitants along with the hill-
station retreats (Kennedy 1991). Portraying
them as the noble guardians of edenic sanc-
tuaries (1991 :59) expressed t w o familiar
tropes (solitude and mimesis) of imperialist dis-
course (Pratt 1986; Duncan 1993). In these
encounters, the trope of solitude reaffirmed
British superiority as it provided escape to a
romantic setting translating place into another
more pristine time. And the trope of mimesis
naturalized social and political relations by em-
ploying the language of scientific objectivity for
709
defining what was Indian. By ascribing quali-
ties of gentleness, grace, and simplicity to the
hill tribes, these British representations contrib-
uted to the imaginative geographies of the
hills and plains (Kennedy 1991) which de-
picted highland and lowland peoples as intrin-
sically different, as tw o places and t w o peo-
ples.
Indian Guests
Society in the summer capitals welcomed
British visitors, but it did not extend the same
reception to even the highest ranked Indians.
The presence of Indian princes in the hill sta-
tions would appear to have been appropriate
given their status among the rulers of India and
by the fact that outside the boundaries of Brit-
ish India, this hereditary ruling class still con-
trolled one-third of India.18 Moreover, Queen
Victorias proclamation of 1858 acknowledged
their authority by establishing an alliance be-
tween these Indian aristocrats and the British
monarch, and this feudal alliance was reaffir-
med and elaborated in the Imperial Durbar of
1877 (see Cohn 1983). But even this fictive
kinship between Indian rulers of the Native
States and British rulers did not ensure Indian
princes would receive a warm reception in the
hill stations.
The Maharajah of Mysore was the first of the
princes to purchase property in Ootacamund
in 1873; by 1890, five to ten Indian rulers main-
tained hot weather homes in Ooty. These
seasonal residents included the Maharajah of
Mysore, the Nizam of Hyderabad, and the
Caekwar of Baroda-three of the five highest
princes of India who had been honored with
a twenty-one gun salute in recognition of their
prestige and their role as a faithful ally of the
British Empire (Forbes 1939:224). In Ooty,
they resided in among the best and most ex-
pensively built of the European houses (SIO:
July 6, 1907).
But entry into Ooty society, as the Nizam of
Hyderbad discovered, could be quite difficult.
Despite his rank as first among the princes of
India, he could not conclude t w o real estate
agreements. In 1886, after attempting to buy a
mansion once occupied by the commander-
in-chief of the Madras Army, he took the
owner to court for breach of contract and won.
The British land owners in Ootacamund de-
710
nied any discrimination on their part, but the
Nizam concluded that the government had
brought influence to bear in an attempt to con-
trol the sale of European housing (SIO: July
7, 1886). Some of the resistance to these rulers
probably reflected concerns over the large en-
tourages which the Indian princes brought to
the hills and the possibility of more disease
(Kanwar 1990:130). In Exodus of Hyderabad
Government to Ootacamund, the hill-station
newspaper commented on the consequences
of the Nizam of Hyderbads residence in the
hills by referring to the Nizams followers
(90:May 21, 1889):
Not that they prefer living in Ooty even during the
hottest part of the year in the Deccan-indeed they
dislike it exceedingly-but in the fear of what a day
may bring forth in a Government so capricious as
that of Hyderbad. . . . Self preservation is the first
law of nature especially amongst Hyderbad
officials, and it is not to be wondered at that every
one of them dreads to be separated from the ear
into which the insidious whisper of the enemy
might be poured.. . .
Oriental traits such as court intrigue helped
t o explain the attraction of a summer location
for Hyderabads government. The intertwining
of imperial discourse and discourse of climate
in the newspapers statement imply that the hill
stations advantages are wasted on these
guests. Several years later, a confidential let-
ter from Viceroy Lansdowne to Governor
Wenlock put the matter bluntly (Wenlock June
24, 1891):
Native Chiefs endeavor to get hold of property in
hill stations. A good many houses in Simla are al-
ready owned by Rajas, but we do not allow any
of them to come up or to buy houses without
leave. . . . M y own idea is that the presence of
these Chiefs at hill stations is distinctly undesirable,
and that we ought to discourage it in every way.
I recently refused to permit a high official to sell
his house to one of them.
The theory of authority established in Queen
Victorias proclamations of 1858 and 1877,
which joined Indian and British rulers as aris-
tocratic brothers, was not easily translated into
action in the small, closed world of the imperial
and provincial hill stations during the years of
imperial expansion.
Nor was the reception of so-called Native
Gentlemen anymore welcoming. As the west-
ern-educated elite that made up the majority
of late nineteenth-century Indian nationalists
won a limited voice, the caste native Gentle-
Kenny
man was gradually incorporated into the prac-
tice of government. In Ooty, Indians made sev-
eral attempts after 1884 to provide accommo-
dations for those who came to Ootacamund
for business or duty while Government was
there (90: March 18, 1884). Success finally
came in 1911, when the first Indian member
of the Governors Executive Commission-the
Maharajah of Bobili-offered to donate a large
portion of his salary to build the Lawley Insti-
tute, a residential club for Indian gentlemen
named in honored of the governor for whom
the Maharajah had served. The government
approved construction of the facility on condi-
tion that the institute remain non-political in its
affiliation (Government of Madras No. 2749:
September 9, 1911) A small step had been
made toward the admission of the Native Gen-
tleman to the summer capital through the ef-
forts of the loyal Maharajah of Bobili.
Postscript
By the beginning of World War I, the devel-
opment of Ootacamund as a summer capital
had reached its zenith. After the war, growing
Indian nationalism inspired by new campaigns
of civil disobedience could not be ignored
even in the hills. Referring to Simla, Gandhi
described the summer capital of imperial gov-
ernment as government working from the
500th floor (Pubby 1988:7). After World
War I, the Indian National Congress organized
a boycott against government in the hill sta-
tions which it labeled as undemocratic. Over
the next few decades, the British practice of
transferring funds from the low country to the
hills became indefensible. By the 1930s, the
government ended its six-month summer re-
treat to the Nilgiris; Ootacamund became once
again primarily a place for holidays.
Todays residents of the hill station hold
mixed views of the imperial years. During the
municipalitys centenary, a former health
officer recounted a story of city laborers being
put to work to raze a structure that a native
of means dared to build in a portion of the
town in exclusive occupation of white men
(Sankaran 1966:2). The lighter side of the pic-
ture, as he described it, was the introduction
of public improvements that were object les-
sons and hallmarks for civic bodies all over the
country. (1966:3) This officers ambivalence
 The British Hill Station in India
about the hill station is not unusual. Few doubt
that the hill stations were replicas of the well-
planned British town where Indians played a
subservient role (Kanwar 1990).
Conclusion
Nostalgia for home is quite natural among
expatriates. But the English country life recre-
ated in the hill station also elaborated on the
greater prestige of an imperial people. From
1870 to World War I, the official status of Oo-
tacamund was encoded in the landscape.
Separated as they were from the centers of
population, authority was not represented in
such a manner as to legitimize their status as
rulers to those they ruled. In fact, whether by
benign neglect or conscious effort, the Indian
population was limited to government clerks,
shopkeepers, and servants. Instead, the model
of British country life was adapted to service in
India. When British colonials thought of Eng-
land, they saw not merely a historic country-
side filled with country houses and public
schools where officers and gentlemen were
bred, but also a model of authority for their
relations with subordinates. Nostalgia and
authority thus guided the British interpretation
of the natural environment and the construc-
tion of the built environment in the hill stations
of India. From the early development of Ooty's
lake to the Palladian-style of Government
House, a British place was created in order to
carry out "European" work. Within this place
of colonial authority, height carried further
symbolic significance. Located in commanding
positions above the Indian settlements, the
church, government offices, and the English
town remained separate and superior to any of
the uses below.
It is a widely accepted tenet in cultural geog-
raphy that landscape constitutes a culturally
produced expression of social order. That was
what one governor's wife had in mind in de-
scribing Ootacamund as "an island of British
atmosphere hung above the Indian plains"
(Pentland 1928). Her imagery splendidly natu-
ralizes the social world of Ootacamund and its
separation from the Indian centers in the plains.
Both the nineteenth-century imperial discourse
and the discourse of climate served to reflect
and reinforce the emerging belief in racial dif-
ference. For the most part, the lessons learned
711
in the early days of the hill stations were lost
by the latter part of the nineteenth century and
socialization or acclimatization had no ex-
planatory value when assessing the hills as a
resource for British use. The events of the In-
dian revolt of 1857 confirmed the growing be-
lief that Indians were irreconcilably different
and "scientific" racial theory supported the
view. In this way, the hill station was tied to a
framework of meaning that influenced the Brit-
ish view of the non-western world in general.
Examination of these discourses suggests links
to our understanding of modern repre-
sentations of the people and conditions of the
"third world" (itself a construction) as well.
Creation of the hill station allowed the British
imperialists to emphasize their concepts of set-
tlement planning and their priorities for secu-
rity, sanitation, and the establishment of various
amenities. Environmental theories of disease
were refined in the latter part of the nineteenth
century by new insights on contagions. Con-
sequently, the "native" became the site of dis-
ease, and Anglo-Indian efforts to segregate In-
dian settlements secured unanticipated ameni-
ties. The planning of these ideal British towns,
invite reinspection particularly with respect to
British control of the Indian "infrastructure" that
supported the "comforting little piece of Eng-
land." Given the rather heavy hand of the Brit-
ish, it is not surprisingly that the ambivalence
that has surrounded Indian interpretations of
these settlements during the imperial age has
not entirely faded away. The Victorian social,
political, and aesthetic values inscribed on
these resort settlements and summer capitals
raise issues today that defy easy resolution
when weighed against the goals of a socialist
India. The hill stations are no longer enclaves
of a foreign power and, yet the question of
their future retains symbolic significance in light
of their past.
Acknowledgments
The major portion of this research was funded by
Syracuse University's Shell Fellowship and supple-
mented by a Graduate School Research Grant from
the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Cambridge
University's Centre for South Asian Studies and the
India Office Library and Records Office have kindly
given permission for the use of photographs from
their collections. Thanks are due to James S. Duncan,
Herb Childress, Rina Chose, and three anonymous
712 Kenny
I
reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this
paper and the U W - M Cartographic Lab for carto-
graphic assistance.
Notes
1. Udagamandalam is currently the official name for
the settlement. Although the majority of the resi-
dents continue to use the hill tribe name, the
state of Tamil Nadu has tied the hill station into
the language of the plains in its selection of an
official title. For consistency, Ootacamund and
other colonial-period spellings (such as Simla for
Shimla) will be used in this article.
2. See Mitchell (1972) for a list of ninty-six Indian
hill stations built by the British and more recently
by Indians. Her extensive discussion distin-
guishes stations by age and eight categories of
size and function.
3. Anglo-Indian as applied to British colonials in In-
dia is historically accurate in this paper. The term
was applied to the Eurasian population in India
only after World War I.
4. For a case study of Simla (Shimla) and the recent
impact of urbanization in a hill station, see
Sharma (1986).
5 . Following Said (1993:221), I use the term impe-
rialism to mean "the practice, the theory, and the
attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center rul-
ing a distant territory."
6. The British used "European" as a racial category
to distinguish themselves from their Indian sub-
jects, and this paper uses it in that sense. Al-
though l d o not wish to overstate the congru-
ence between European and British in terms of
policies andlor adaptations to life in the tropics,
the Spanish, Dutch, and Americans in Southeast
Asia also constructed settlements akin to hill sta-
tions.
7. The definition of discourse used in this paper is
not the deterministic one of Michel Foucault
(1967), which assumes that discourses are in-
commensurable or indisputable from the out-
side. I assume that while some discourses are
hegemonic, others are contestatory.
8. As defined by Said (1993:9), colonialism "which
is almost always a consequence of imperialism,
is the implanting of settlements on distant terri-
tory." Although I define the discourses analyzed
in this paper as imperial, Bhabha (1994) and the
literary theorists that have followed his direction
employ the term "colonial discourse theory" to
describe their work.
9. Kanwar (1990) gives some attention to Indian
views of the imperial hill station of Simla, al-
though she notes that myths rather than docu-
mentable accounts make up most of this record.
These, of course, have value in themselves. For
the many in India who never saw the hills, they
became a symbol of the government's disregard
for the people of India. For an analysis of hill
stations as summer capitals of the Raj from this
perspective, see Kenny (1 990:133-I 71 ).
10. Tropes are rhetorical devices that carry meaning
other than their literal sense. Following White
(1978:2), . . troping is the soul of discourse . . .
'I.
the mechanism without which discourse cannot
do its work or achieve its end."
11. See Adas (1989).
12. The Government of India Act of 1861 established
four provincial legislatures in addition to the im-
perial government (Gopal 1965:165). Territorial
reorganization took place in 1905.
13. As argued by Cosgrove (1985), a well-managed
country house and its lands represented a self-
sufficient world, a microcosm of the mercantilist
state. This "English" landscape was composed of
the Palladian country house and its enclosed
parkland of sweeping lawns, artistically-grouped
trees, and serpentine lakes.
14. See Cohn (1983) and Metcalfe (1989) for a dis-
cussion of these two styles and the deliberations
over the appropriateness of one or the other of
these "cultural constructions" as a reflection of
the new colonial order in India.
15. Train service to Ootacamund was only com-
pleted in 1908, and service from Madras to Met-
tapollium (at the foot of the Nilgiris) did not exist
prior to 1873. Prior to train service, tongas and
bullock carts brought people and goods the re-
maining thirty miles from Mettapollium to Oota-
camund. This portion of the journey alone re-
quired eight to ten hours.
16. Studying the shift of emphasis within architecture
and city planning during the eighteenth century,
Foucault (1980:150) noted that the principal spa-
tial variables were related to social hygiene, and
these rendered the city as a "medicalisable ob-
ject."
17. Hill tribes include the Todas, Kota, Badagas, and
Kurumbas. The Todas were the only non-agricul-
tural people.
18. See Dutt and Geib (1987) for maps of British-
controlled territory and the Native States in 1857
and prior to independence in 1947.
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Kenny, Judith T. 1995. Climate, Race, and Imperial Authority: The Symbolic Landscape of the
British Hill Station in India. Annals o f the Association o f American Geographers 85(4):694-714.
Abstract.

Nostalgia for home is quite natural among expatriates. The English country life recreated in the
hill stations of India, however, was elaborated on by the greater prestige of an imperial people.
This paper examines the hill station as a landscape type tied to nineteenth-century discourses
of imperialism and climate. Both discourses serve as evidence of a belief in racial difference and,
thereby, the imperial hill station reflected and reinforced a framework of meaning that influenced
European views of the non-western world in general. Because the hill station was seen as a
resource to be protected for use by the British ruler, the standards used in colonial settlement
planning are framed in these discourses of privilege and difference. Primary attention is given
to the high imperial age from 1870 to 1914 when construction activity was greatest. Ootaca-
mund, the summer capital of the Madras presidency in southern India, serves as the case study
for evaluating this landscape type. Key Words: climate, colonial settlement planning, hill station,
imperial discourse, India, Ootacamund, race.

Correspondence: Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee,

Wisconsin, 53201.